Haiti

2010

He's young,
unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn't spent
much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer
Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk's description of chemical dumping into a
brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was
punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in
response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly
removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air.
That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.

The streets of Brooklyn seemed too wide to me and the buildings huge. The number 3 train would pass over and over again like a luminous monster. From the window of my apartment, I would watch this train go by. I would also watch people walk without speaking to one another. My days were monotonous and nightmares invaded my nights. I recalled vividly how in Haiti my family and I were threatened with death several times, culminating in an evening when unidentified gunmen targeted my house. In the days after that, they assaulted and attacked other journalists working for the same media outlet as me. Such heinous acts haunted my dreams.

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Three months after the January 12 earthquake, Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, has resumed daily publication. The April 6 issue not only signaled the resumption of daily publication, it marked a return to some normality, said Frantz Duval, the daily’s new editor-in-chief.

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Three months after it opened, Haitian journalists are still benefitting from the wide-ranging services provided by the Media Operations Center, which has provided a workspace for journalists after the earthquake. While radio stations based in the capital are back on the air, the long power cuts and problems accessing the Internet are still prompting journalists to seek refuge at the center, said local veteran journalist Yves Marie Chanel. He called it “an essential anchor point for local journalists and those working for international media outlets in Haiti.”

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Of the 12 radio stations in the city Leogane, south of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, only five are back on the air more than two months after the earthquake. Most stations were seriously damaged and several broadcasters are struggling to restore transmission, the head of the Leogane Press Association (APL), Julmane Saint Fort, told CPJ. Saint Fort said that six radio stations were completely destroyed and five severely damaged while the rest suffered some minor material harm.

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Haiti’s
sole newspaper published exclusively in Creole has disappeared under the rubble
of the January 12 earthquake. The Port-au-Prince
offices of the monthly Bon Nouvel (Good News) were destroyed, as were
the facilities of its La Phalange printing unit, which
specialized in the production of Creole-language books and documents.

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In the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake, Kerby Joseph
stays on the job. He helps gather news for Amikal FM, a radio station that now broadcasts
from a tent in the devastated Haitian town of Leogane, where most of the buildings have been
damaged or destroyed. But the radio station lacks the money to pay Joseph's
salary. So ever since the disaster, Joseph works for free, retiring at the end
of the day to a camp where he shares a makeshift, tin-roofed shelter with 10 other
people “I haven't been paid anything—not a cent,” Joseph said. “We just keep
working for the community. Quite simply, that's why we do this.”

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Thousands of Haitians, including many journalists, have fled the country since the January 12 earthquake. Ronald Leon, a veteran journalist who worked with Haiti’s National Television station, Radio Caraibes and Tropic FM, has now settled in Florida, leaving behind his family and his journalism training school, Ameritech, which was destroyed in the earthquake. Its last class had 15 students.

The French weekly Courrier International opened its columns on February 4 to Haitian print media journalists in a special edition being circulated worldwide. The paper’s managers did it to express solidarity with Haitian journalists following the earthquake, which completely paralyzed the publication of the country’s dailies.

The two dailies in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin,were honored in the special edition. Haiti Liberté, a Haitian weekly based in Brooklyn, New York, also participated.

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Radio
Lumière has officially published the names of three of its journalists who died in the January 12 earthquake in Haiti: Jude Marcellus, Marlene Joseph, and Ginord Desplumes. They died under the rubble of collapsed buildings. It took a month for Radio Lumière officials to decide to publish the names of the three victims.